 other series. We're so happy that you have joined us throughout the summer, throughout the pandemic, and we're so excited about this final episode. Before we begin, we want to encourage you to sign up for an ad week subscription. You can go to adweek.com slash offer to unlock unlimited access to our essential content and resources. Today, we are joined by Heeth, who is the global lead of the B2B Institute at LinkedIn. Happy almost September, Ty. Thank you. Happy almost September. It's my favorite. Yes, I love New York in the fall. But, you know, it's such a weird time. So, you know, how are you doing? How have you been processing everything that's changed and solved and paused and evolved this during this time? Yeah. Let me just start by saying thank you so much for having me. It's always such a pleasure to talk and for giving this forum for all of us to connect. I think that's what we're all needing more than anything is community. And we're all kind of learning how to do it virtually. And, you know, it's been, I can't lie, it's been real. You know, this has hit all of us really hard. Some of us harder than others. And some of us are disproportionately impacted by what's happening. And so I would venture to say that many folks are probably feeling a little bit weary and exhausted. But I also think that there are some places where we find hope, and especially when we do it together in community. For me, just for me in terms of like leading my team and leading friends and colleagues through this, I'm practicing more self-care. You know, I think everyone deserves to spend a little bit more time taking care of yourself during this time. No one expects us to be superhuman as we navigate through this. You know, and I also think that we want to guard against despair and cynicism because we will, it's not going to be like this forever. It's not going to be like this forever. Yeah, I love it. I think he just took some time on. You know, you get to come back refreshed and you talk about community. There are lots of voices, emerging voices, and also thought leaders who have kind of risen to the top with their relatable topics. So in terms of the people who are on LinkedIn looking for content and inspiration, what are they looking for? And what are they consuming? What's really resonating on LinkedIn? Yeah, yeah. I think everyone is trying to make sense of the world and including us at LinkedIn within the B2B Institute, which by the way, let me take a step back and define it. Some people are wondering, what is that? What's the B2B Institute? So B2B Institute is a think tank. And we collaborate with marketers and practitioners and folks that are thinkers and thought leaders in the space of marketing to help figure out how marketers can create more value and how we can accelerate business-to-business relationships. So that's what we do within the think tank. It's kind of like being a bit of an academic, thought leadership, education, all of that sort of wrapped into one. But like everyone else, we've been trying to make sense of the world. And what people have been engaging in and searching on LinkedIn have been really topics around how do we move into the space of remote working? How do I invest in business continuity through this time? I mean, if you think about all the connected searches around business continuity, we've seen an increase in about 75% of those types of searches and over 100%, 140 something percent in terms of engagement on those topics. So people are trying to make sense of the world. And I think in particular, what they've tried to do on LinkedIn is learn from others and look into what other people are doing and connecting conversation around how do I transition my culture? How do I take care of my people, meaning employees? How do I take care of my customers? How do I take care of my leaders? How do I take care of even my shareholders during this time? So people are looking to others to try to navigate through this time. So we're seeing searches around that, including searches on things like machine learning and data science. So people are still with trends. I think that everyone would imagine would be accelerated by what we're going through right now. We're certainly seeing evidence of that being accelerated on our platform in the conversations that are taking place. Yeah, you talked about your clients and we talked about self-care. So my hope is that there's a lot more sharing on leaders. And of course, our guest last week, a couple of weeks ago, she has a LinkedIn course and she's teaching people about entrepreneurship. But how do you almost become a thought leader? Is it simply having expertise in sharing it? What does it take to cultivate that thought leadership, especially at this time? Yeah, I think it certainly goes back to culture. And just taking a step back because I think the word thought leadership is overused in some ways and maybe not very well understood. So just sort of diving into it. In the context of what we're dealing with within the pandemic, the idea of thought and ideas and idea generation. LinkedIn has been a place where people are certainly looking for ideas as to how do I transition my culture? How do I invest and prevent my team from being burned out? And we've seen the content being generated there. But when you think about thought leadership, the more broad definition of thought leadership, it's not just creating a piece of content. It's the idea of thought leadership rooted in thought is the idea of idea generation and forward thinking, future looking, having a point of view on where things will go, such that it builds credibility, you become a trusted resource and therefore you can win business, build, which fundamentally is connected to relationships and having strong relationships and trusted relationships. So it really does come from a place of trust. And we've seen people sort of investing in thought leadership around the way forward during this time and expressing that on the platform. Now, when it comes to thought leadership from the standpoint of marketing, beyond the creation of content, strong thought leadership involves going out into the field, having conversations with customers. It involves then thinking through ideas and debating ideas. I'll tell you, within the B2B Institute, we will debate an idea and it will be refined through that conversation, but it's not just the internal debate of your team. It's the community around you where that you build that can help cultivate the strongest ideas and then help you define the path forward. So it's beyond maybe outsourcing a piece of content to an agency or just thinking about how you might write a post, give in some information or some insights you have to share. It's actually doing the work of framing the idea and then taking it to market. So I want to say a little bit more about that, but let me pause and see if that's making sense to you, Ko. Yeah, and it's making sense with one of our audience members, Ashley says, agreed, branch to keep this thought process when creating new content. And I oversee the thought leadership or opinion section of Adweek, and there are some similarities there. It's not just kind of sharing what's happening now, but really that forward looking voice and that credibility that comes with experience, which is really different right now. Everyone has been talking about adaptability and flexibility. So I'm curious, as you continue sharing your insights, what areas that thought leadership will really grow in the year to come? What are the implications for doing business and taking care of clients and client relationship, sales, whatnot in the decade to come? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about where things are going, what we're experiencing now is not a smooth trend line transition. This pandemic that we're in is kind of a abrupt jolt where now I feel like we're in a new realm, it's a new path for us to try to define the way forward. We're dealing with different variables now. So I think that's one thing to consider as we're thinking about the direction. For example, in the space of virtual connections, we're not going to go back in very many places to where we were before when you start thinking about remote work, the way that people sell, even the way that we are marketing. So there's a fundamental shift in what's happening. And that does require doing the work, going out into the community, having conversations. And what's at stake is what we've been dealing with in the space of thought leadership for some time. And that's the recognition that only 5% of the thought leadership is deemed to be quality thought leadership. So a lot of what we're creating is not being consumed because we're not investing enough in the things that generate high quality, strong thought leadership. So I just want to touch on that for just a second, because as you think about how you create strong thought leadership, some of the things that we think about within the B2B Institute is, you know, is it is the idea replicable? You know, the best ideas that you can generate are ideas that when you repeat them through experiment and you think about the scientific method, they're repeatable. The strongest ideas are replicable. We're also looking for areas that are contrarian. And what I mean by contrarian is that there are little known ideas that kind of go against the grain. When you think about it, you can be consensus, you can create ideas that are with the crowd, contrarian against the crowd, and then you have ideas that are wrong and ideas that are right. And so when you're when you're investing in ideas that are contrarian and right, there are ideas that are little invested in, but you can take advantage of that entire opportunity because they're they're little known, right? So then you get the full breath of that space. So we're constantly looking for ideas that are contrarian, because those ideas are the most valuable as well. And, you know, I there are a couple other points, but I think we're also looking for the ideas that you can build over the test of time. I think too many of us in marketing are thinking short term versus long term, and brand building is is all about thinking long term and building equity, building ideas that people return to year after year after year. One of the best known, what we call Blackbuster franchises of all time is Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report, right? So when that report used to come out, it would totally break the internet. So we want to start thinking about how do we create Blackbuster content that's recognizable? Salesforce does this really well with their state of marketing and state of sales content that they put out, Edelman Trust Therometers, another example of this type of Blackbuster content. Within the B2B Institute, we invest in what we call B2B Trends. So these are trends that stand the test of time, you have about 30 of them to this date that we've been putting out over the course of five years. So you can find that at b2binstitute.org, but we recommend looking for ideas that are replicable, contrarian, and then also making sure that you're taking a Blackbuster point of view. How can you create a franchise that you can build over time? Yeah, I love that because it's not just about success, but going back to the kind of scientific framework, it's proving a new hypothesis, right? And having that little room for error and the most kind of ROI for whatever idea that you're building upon, and that can change a little bit over time. But again, it's good thought leadership, as you're saying, because it can be a learning, living, breathing experiment for other brands. So that's a really kind of cool way to look at it. I guess one of the last questions I want to ask you is what you're kind of looking forward to, the positives that have come out of this time, what are you looking forward to for the rest of 2020 on a kind of personal and professional level? Yeah, yeah. So I'll start with professionals. So one of the things I'm looking forward to is just now that we've kind of gotten into a rhythm. So it was, like I said, it was a jolt. We're all trying, like, figuring out, like, what do we do? How do we respond? And again, how do we take care of all of our stakeholders? So we've gotten into a bit of a rhythm. And so now what I'm really looking forward to is continuing to invest in the culture of our team. You know, what I mean, going back to the idea of thought leadership, part of the ability to generate strong leadership is rooted in the culture of your team. I think one of the fallacies that we need to overturn is this idea that there's like some genius in a tower or like in the basement somewhere that's just public on their own coming up with these like fresh ideas that are just filler and start to think about how do we do that collaboratively. So I want to invest even more deeply in this idea. Actually, one of the gentlemen on my team, his name is John Lombardo, I definitely definitely check him out. He raised this idea called genius. And it's it goes against the grain of like this one genius in a tower and instead talks about genius being embedded in a broader collaborative scene, where a number of people work together and sort of build and bounce idea, we don't always agree, but that conversation that scene is what generates the best ideas. So I'm looking forward to continuing to strengthen our our seniors within our team. Professionally, I'm just kind of geeking out over what's to come in terms of some of the research we have coming out, but you can always find it b2binstitute.org. And then personally, I so I just spent some time with my parents, which was really nice. I hadn't seen them since February. And so I one of the other things I'm looking forward to doing is visiting them safely over the next couple months. And I think, you know, for all of us, this is a time with making us slow down, it's making us pause a bit and think about the things that are most important to us. And now seems like a time more than any other time where I can get to spend a little bit more time with my parents and just kind of get to know them again at during this time. So I'm really looking forward to that and also just sort of cultivating relationships. Not all of that has to happen in person. It can happen virtually. But I think community is key, which is why I adore what you do at AdWeek. You all bring people together beautifully. You bring amazing content to help us, you know, think through and navigate these challenges. I mean, literally, the title of this broadcast is AdWeek Together. So that's that's what I'm looking forward to. Yeah, absolutely. Connection, you know, is so healthy. And the quality connection is so beautiful. Before I let you go, I wanted to share a comment from Josh to ask you a follow up question. So Josh said absolutely going against the green can be the most valuable decision for a company because it allows you to test those hypothesis one might have balancing that with the core philosophy of the business is the key. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then you talked about, you know, having that collaborative seniors, right, as a key in kind of cultivating culture. Can you elaborate on that? Does that mean everyone brings, you know, their maybe ideas from different thought leaders to the table? Is it, you know, approaching it in a different way? Like, what are you doing? And I asked this because, you know, we talked about this before about how people are also interested in stories. So what are kind of the stories that work, right? So what's what's the story? I'll give you an example straight from our team. And I don't think people talk about this enough. When it comes to thought leadership creation, I think, you know, many people take the approach of outsourcing the work before sort of debating the ideas and getting kind of rolling up your sleeves and kind of diving into customer conversations. You know, but just to talk about the definition of the seniors, it is a group of people not all have don't have to have the same point of view, right, are committed to doing the work, you know, rolling up your sleeves, learning, reading, doing the deep work. And then the ideas are then strengthened in conversation to the so to the point of the person who just commented, yes, there should be it should be, you know, rotating around that core concept, but you're looking for those ideas. So, you know, for example, within our team, we'll generate a few ideas and bounce them around in conversation. Most of those get killed off. But the best ideas rise to the top within the seniors and thinkers within your team. You may also have some as a part of your seniors thought leaders and or folks that are thinkers on particular topics or even outside of your team. But the point is that it's not just one person, you know, like I said, in a tower that's a genius. I think that's the misconception that people have about thought leadership. It's a it's a community generated and such that the best ideas move forward. The other thing I would say that we need to guard against right now is because of all the distraction, you know, we're living in a time when there's so there's so much news and so much that's being thrown at us, it's stressful. But it is tough, it's difficult for us to do the deep work that's required to think and read and process ideas for yourself and ask yourself why. And why does this matter and why would it matter to this audience and to question that and perhaps do that with two or three other people after having done the work yourself of asking those questions. There's a book actually by Cal Newport called Deep Work. And he kind of talks about how, you know, the distractions that we face today with all the technology and I work for a social media company but from time to time I have to step away and almost like go into a cabin in the woods. I mean, I'm just I'm not literally but like I have to be away to be able to think about those ideas. But then when you come back to your seniors and you ask the question, you know, what do you think about this idea? Does this resonate? What comes up for you? And I think that's how we can strengthen our ideas and start to expand on that statistic I gave where you know, only 5% of the thought leadership is truly hitting, you know, think a little bit differently about how we generate that. Yeah, right, making me want to rethink the LinkedIn post where I ask questions to try to bounce off ideas. But hopefully, hopefully the good cream rises to the top. But Tahit from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, I do want to thank you for pausing and taking this time to, you know, share what it's been like for you and your team. And, you know, especially for the LinkedIn audience. So thank you again so much for being with us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thank you to our listeners and our viewers for joining us on this journey of AdWeek together. We do want to remind you to sign up for an AdWeek pro subscription so you can stay connected with us and stay connected to the content that's at adweek.com slash offer. We do hope that you have a great September and the rest of 2020 ahead where we can take pause and make great progress. For AdWeek, I'm Cohen. I'm Claire. Oh, Ty, I want to spend more time with you.